Archive for Food
Raffling the Vogalonga
Posted by: | CommentsIt all seems (in fact, it all is) very long ago now, but last May 23 was the 36th edition of the annual rowing marathon called the Vogalonga.
The 2009 edition was fairly appalling, and if I were to feel like writing a full account I’d need a strip of paper five Babylonian cubits long, or whatever the electronic equivalent might be.
This year everything was perfect, so I didn’t have anything to write about. You know how they say bad news is more interesting than good news? (I guess somebody says that.) Same thing here. How many different ways can you say “It was great”?
But great or ghastly as the “Long Row” may be, each year the organizing committee gives each rower a numbered stub when he or she registers, then a few months later puts on a raffle and holds a drawing for the prizes.
As the drawing commences, it looks as if the boats themselves are waiting, like puppies in the pound, to find out who their new masters will be.
I dimly recall this event as occurring closer to the date of the Vogalonga itself, but for the past several years this convocation has been scheduled for late fall, when one’s memories of the equatorial heat and humidity, or whatever other weather dominated your spring morning in the lagoon, have been replaced by the sepulchral chill of an autumn twilight.
Thus we gathered last Friday night, in the waterside pavilion of the fish market at the Rialto, as usual, for the official thanking-of-many-brave-and-tireless collaborators, and for the drawing.
Venetian oars, like the forcolas, vary according to size and type of boat. These slender constructions suit the mascareta but would be too light and short for a gondola.
The prizes are pretty simple: Nine pairs of forcolas and nine pairs of oars, either pair suitable for rowing a Venetian mascareta. And two gleaming, brand-new mascaretas in the flesh.
One was financed by the Casino, a bittersweet reminder of the days not so long ago when the Casino had money to lavish on sponsorships all over the city, before their guy in the green eyeshade hit “total” and discovered they were 45 million euros ($52,356,493) in the red. And the other vessel was offered by the Assessorato al Turismo, or Tourism Department, similarly reduced, or so the reports have it, to eating shoe leather and tree bark to stay alive. I remember when there were three boats to be raffled off, but times are hard even in mascaretaland.
Here is how the event feels: I smile at an assortment of boating friends, (good); I feel the cold and damp seeping from the wet granite paving stones up through my shoes as the darkening air forms moisture everywhere around me (less good, but tolerable). And I metaphorically clamp an inverted facelock around the head of that inevitable craving that always lunges at me from when I see a boat that might, perhaps, in my dreams, be mine — that Christmas-morning suspense, but without any of the pleasure of knowing you’ll actually get to open the presents (not good at all.)
These forcolas may look merely like blunt instruments but they are works of exceptional engineering, traditionally made of a single piece of walnut.
So we walked around the boats, like everybody else was doing. We stood and listened to the various pronouncements made by Lalo Rosa Salva, chief organizer and tutelary deity of the Vogalonga. We watched the winners walking away with their prizes. I stifled my urge to wail.
And then there was the buffet. No event can ever be said to have occurred in life here if food is not in some way attached to it. Attached at the end of said event, naturally, otherwise people would just skip it and head directly to the noshfest, however modest it might be.
Because the Rosa Salva family runs one of the city’s oldest and best-known pastry-making and catering operations, there were sandwiches and cookies and wine and sodas and water galore.
The refreshments may not look like much to fight over, but you'd be surprised how strongly some people feel about getting as much as they want.
I remember when the buffet was somewhat more sumptuous — not that I’m complaining. But let the record show that I remember a generous assortment of sandwiches, and tiny finger-pizzas, and pastries as well as cookies, and also fruit. Those were buffets that had a certain allure, as attested by the variety of matrons who, in their instinctive, ruthless way, would appear from nowhere and always get to the table first, claiming their spot with more conviction than Columbus claiming North America, and not budging.
They’d stand there eating, elbows half-cocked to ward off any possible intruders, and I have even seen these dowagers stuff extra snacks into their conveniently large handbags. Or even shopping bags, brought for the occasion. Yes, I have seen that with these very eyes. The buffet has always, at least up to the other night, provided more drama than the drawing, because some ignorant or foolhardy person would occasionally try to displace one of these dreadnoughts. This year, though, the dowagers didn’t even show up. A sign more vivid than the shrinking prizes that times have indeed become hard. Pretty soon we’ll have to start stockpiling canned goods.
Oh, about the boats: I didn’t win one. But as I watched members of the two lucky clubs carry the mascaretas bodily to the Grand Canal, some perplexing thoughts seeped into my mind.
Such as: If Venetian rowers (by which I mean people, of whatever provenance, who row in the Venetian way) form the smallest possible percentage of participants, which they do (something like a quarter of the total) why are the prizes only suitable for Venetian rowing? Me, I think it’s just fine, and a brilliant way to stand firm for whatever can still be maintained of Venetian-ness. I merely note that for someone from Lithuania who rows a kayak, a forcola and an 11-foot [3.30 meters] wooden oar might not be exactly what they’d consider a prize. Of course they could sell it, but that would be crass.
Off and into the water, where she belongs.
And this: Why would either of the entities who paid for the two boats feel any particular need or desire to do so? Of course it’s a very handsome gesture, but if the main purpose is self-publicity — and I may have misinterpreted the reasoning — there must be items with more advertising throw-weight than two little boats which will only ever be seen here where everybody already knows about the Casino and the Tourism Department.
And this: I know raffles are intended to be, or to appear to be, composed of free gifts (i.e., gifts paid for by somebody other than the participants). But considering that each person pays a registration fee, technically you could say that the winner of oars or forcolas had already paid for them. But there I go, being crass.
Anyway, I didn’t win anything, so I don’t care. Now I think I’ll go buy a lottery ticket. Maybe my odds will improve and then I’ll be able to buy an entire boatyard all for myself.
This is the racing mascareta, maybe not my first choice for everyday tooling around town. But I would never turn it down.
Venetian fish-feed
Posted by: | CommentsFor much of the year, you will almost certainly see people fishing right under the lee of the most beautiful city in the world. From Sant’ Elena to San Marco, plus other assorted spots along or in the lagoon, they’re out with a couple of poles and a whole batch of free time. Just now there are more than usual because we are in the period of the fraima [frah-EE-ma], when most of the fish are heading out to sea.
Depending on the time of year — obviously — these tenacious anglers might be hoping for seppie, or gilthead or sea bass or even grey mullet. Or whatever The Supreme Fish Deity decides to send swimming past their hooks, old boots and lost gloves excluded.
You can also expect to see people out in their boats, anchored where the tide is going to give them the biggest assist. Sometimes this perfect fishing spot will be just about in the center of the trajectory of cruise ships or large ferries heading to or from Greece. The captains blow their klaxons in a huffy sort of way. The fishermen are all deaf.
The subject of fish and the lagoon is one that I’m going to expand on some other time — probably many times. Meanwhile, though, I just want to alert you to the fact that there is a dedicated chunk of the male population — they’re always men, though sometimes the guys in the boats bring their wives, if the weather’s nice — who see the lagoon as a place where they might find something delectable to eat, or at least find some of their friends.
By “friends” I mean people they know. Fishermen have no friends; even if a person they’ve known since childhood, maybe even a relative, asks how’s the fishing, they’ll never say it’s good. They get all vague and crafty. Or if he’s obviously lugging home a miraculous catch, he’ll never say where he was. This is true everywhere on earth, and no less so here.
Two of my best moments so far involving fishing (as opposed to fish itself) relate to how Lino sees it. Briefly put, he doesn’t believe that anyone born after about 1960 — my ballpark date — knows anything about the lagoon or its inhabitants. I’m thinking he’s probably right.
I'm staying where the tide is best for me, and the big ships can just work around me. Or stay home. Or sink.
An example: We passed a young man one late summer night on the Lido — it was dark, but not terribly late — standing with his pole on the vaporetto dock, staring into the water, waiting. ”He’s never going to catch anything,” Lino stated without even pausing. Why is that? ”Because he’s trying to catch seppie, and that’s the wrong kind of gear. Also, the tide is going out. And they’re not in season right now.”
Second example: We have secretly adopted a man who spends a noticeable portion of his day at the vaporetto dock by the Giardini. The first time I noticed him, I was getting off the boat, and Lino was standing there a few discreet steps behind him, watching. They were both, in their own ways, engrossed.
“What’s he catching?” I asked in a whisper.
“Nothing,” Lino replied as we walked away. ”He’s giving donations (opera di beneficienza, or charity).” Excuse me?
“He’s been there for hours, rolling little balls of a grated cheese/breadcrumb mash, putting them on his hook and then waiting for his pole to twitch. After a little while he pulls it up, and the hook is empty. Even in an aquarium, fish don’t get fed this much.”
So what’s going wrong? Well, first of all, the guy is attaching the bait in such a way that it comes loose a few seconds after it goes under. The foodball just floats away, probably into the mouth of a big smiling fish. The man is up there imagining his hook as an enormous fatal concealed weapon, and the fish are seeing it as a fabulous food delivery system which requires no effort whatsoever on their part. They’re just down there floating around with their jaws open, saying “God, I haven’t eaten this much since Vernon’s bar mitzvah.”
The second thing that’s going wrong is that the guy hasn’t figured out any of this. He just keeps doing it. Lino can’t believe anybody over the age of two could be so persistent — so hopeful, so convinced — at something so futile. But the evidence is before us.
I look at it this way: The man is happy. The wife is happy because he’s out there and not sitting around the house or the bar. And of course the fish are happy. Happy fish, that’s what we want. Happy and bloated.
You can catch a mormora (striped sea bream) in the lagoon, but it's not likely you'd get all these. I just throw this in to give you an idea of the sort of thing the men might be dreaming of as they stare at the water.
Farewell to the soul of summer
Posted by: | CommentsToday I woke up to October, and while you can’t say we’re in the depths of autumn, I’m struggling to accept that summer is no more.
It’s not that fall is so bad — in fact, it has many excellent qualities — but there is one thing about it which I object to. No, it’s not the darkness creeping ever more deeply into the edges of the day, nor the descending temperatures, nor the having to dress with all those layers of clothing that make me feel like some mongrel foot-soldier preparing for battle — brigandine, puttees, Sherden helmet, gauntlets.
No, what I object to is the annual farewell to ice cream.
I know, it doesn’t actually die, it just sort of goes into hibernation. What dies is its natural habitat, which consists of heat, sun, and fatigue. Of course I could eat ice cream at Christmas, but much as I love it, I don’t see the point.
Little-known fact: Summer was actually invented by Italian gelato-makers. Until you’ve eaten gelato in the sweltering depths of an endless July afternoon here in the cradle of the Renaissance, you haven’t tasted it in all its extraordinary glory, its divine combination of flavor, texture, and temperature. It’s the coldness that takes it over the top, far beyond fudge, and I’m convinced that people who live with air conditioning eventually lose their capacity to completely perceive the exquisiteness of the sensation of that frigidity on the tongue. You have to have reached some tertiary level of heat prostration to really appreciate it. Sorry: No suffering, no redemption. No sprinkles.
Cones seem to have been invented by any number of enterprising people since the early 19th century. The division between cone people and cup people is deep and wide.
The great thing about ice cream here is that people regard it as food. More than food, something your body requires for survival in the summer the same way it requires, say, water. It’s not entertainment, it’s nutrition. Articles will appear (I love them) in which doctors and studies are cited praising its benefits to the human body. To hear them talk, you’d think you’d have to eat it even if you hated it.
“Eat gelato,” they say. ”The summer weather demands it. Your body requires it. Have as much as you like, it can’t hurt you, it’s the only thing that can help. It’s crucial for everyone — babies, the bedridden, the new litter of puppies. It’s better for you than Omega-3 fish oil.” Well, they don’t say that, but if they did, I’d believe it.
Here’s an example: Somebody asked on a web forum how many calories are in a gelato that’s served in a cup. Note the clever way of putting the question so that it’s impossible to answer. But an intrepid reader didn’t hesitate: “Last week I heard a report on Tg2 [television station],” he replied, “that said that gelato has very few calories. I think they said 50 calories per cone.” No mention of how many scoops the cone contains, or even the dimensions of said cone. But 50 calories sounds about right to me.
Ice cream is a health food. You have to come to Italy to discover that fact.
One reason, among many, is its lower fat content compared with American ice cream. Another is the lavish use of fresh fruit in season. Either of those beneficial aspects can be annulled by adding whipped cream, of course. Not to mention that you can also get simple slabs of frozen cream. But your average gelato will not be the fat bomb that goes for premium prices back in the US and A.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the US stipulates that to be called “ice cream,” the product must contain no less than 10 percent butterfat. The average is 12 percent. Premium ice creams in the US can contain as much as 20 percent butterfat.
Italian gelato, on the other hand, contains 7-8 percent butterfat. Funny, I don’t miss that other four to 12 percent fat at all. It only means I can eat more of it.
There are a few gelaterie around Venice which in my opinion are worth re-routing your wanderings to visit. The one in the middle of via Galuppi on Burano, the one at the foot of the iron bridge on Murano. (They don’t have names, or I’d give them to you.) The gelateria San Giorgio right here on via Garibaldi.
Who could resist the image of rolling hills of ice cream stretching to the horizon?
I realize that opinions vary. I also realize that there are cultures in which red-bean flavor is more appealing than chocolate/orange fondente. But anyone knows great gelato when they taste it.
Here’s something you may not have known: March 24 is the European Day of Ice Cream. Surely this hasn’t been instituted to jolt people into thinking of ice cream. It must have been to jolt people, such as European Parliament members, into thinking about what new laws and special ordinances they can devise to help ice cream propagate more profusely everywhere.
So who is the patron saint of ice cream makers and/or eaters? There doesn’t seem to be one, but we could construct him or her out of the following pieces: Saint Lawrence (patron saint of candy makers), St. Martha (dieticians), Saint Honorius (bakers and sweets), and St. Brigid (dairy products). Also Saint Dolley Madison.
Thinking, thinking...Maybe it would be easier if there were a doctor behind them whispering how good for you it is.
But great ice cream seems not to depend on geography — in Italy, I mean. Not trying to award medals, but I’ve had great gelato all over the map. There was that little storefront in Torino, and Vivoli in Florence, not to mention San Crispino in Rome. One of the most dazzling frozen treats I’ve ever eaten was served at lunch at a club in Naples. It was a watermelon sorbetto, deep red and with a rich fruity flavor, studded with small chips of bittersweet dark chocolate masquerading as the seeds. Technically not gelato, but unforgettable. And cold.
I suppose the very best ever – why try to categorize? It’s ridiculous — was in a small shop run by an old man in a hillside village up behind Trapani, in Sicily. There were only a few flavors; I tried the “cassata,” but it was only a million times better than normal cassata. The flavor, the texture, the exceptionally perfect level of cold, it all came together into something I am convinced that they eat in heaven.
Somewhere in Venice is a stone cone with four scoops of stone ice cream made just for him. He's been ready for about 400 years.
I’ve had celestial gelato in the usual flavors (strange, in the homeland of espresso I have yet to find a coffee ice cream that means it). And I’ve also had some of the unusual flavors: honey, rose, pomegranate, walnut and fig, pumpkin, carrot and celery (surprisingly good — think carrot cake). Also apple and ginger. Ice-cream makers, like artists anywhere, are on some kind of continual quest.
A few years ago, an Italian legislator got his name in the paper because of his complaint about the deplorable quality of the ice cream served in the Parliament cafeteria. Does this tell us more about the quality of the ice cream, or of the public servant to whom it was served? Yet complaining about inferior gelato, at least in the summer, doesn’t seem totally crazy. And you can’t expect him to be complaining about funding for public schools in August. Nobody would care.
Where in the USA do they eat the most ice cream? It isn’t Mesa, Arizona. It’s Alaska. I don’t understand that. It must be the alimentary equivalent of Stockholm syndrome. That, or each Alaskan eats 200 gallons of it between Memorial Day and Labor Day.
More minutiae: In 2007, the USA led the world in ice cream production, yet New Zealand was the country that led the world in ice cream consumption. Italy is merely sixth. More ice cream is eaten in Sweden and Finland than in Italy. There it is again: The colder the country, the colder the food? Bizarre. Unless they’re eating aquavit-flavored gelato. That could work.
So where do gelato makers go in the winter? The jungles of Costa Rica, or perhaps the Okavango Delta of Botswana? I can see them there, up in the trees, sitting on tiny eggs soon to hatch new gelato makers. Don’t laugh, there are more here every year.
I’m going to miss it, though. Prometheus brought fire to humans, but I want to meet the person who brought gelato.
She's either musing on how fleeting are earth's pleasures and how little time we mortals are given to enjoy them, or she's still wondering if she should have gotten the rum raisin instead.
The Redentore returns
Posted by: | CommentsThis past weekend we reached the summer’s festive culmination, the Feast of the Redeemer. But this year the routine was slightly different: No boat, no fireworks. Sounds like heresy, I know. It is heresy. I might as well just call it a club cookout and forget all the historical/traditional frippery.
Things have changed because now we’re in a different rowing club, and in a different place altogether in our minds and spirits. And while we could certainly take a boat and load it up with the usual bovoleti, watermelon, sarde in saor, pasta e fagioli, and all the other traditional noshes to get you from sundown to the fireworks, we just don’t feel like it.
One main reason we — and several other old Venetians I asked at random — don’t feel like going in a boat anymore is because of all the other boats. It’s one thing to be crushed amid swarming hordes of people ashore, it’s quite another to find yourself in the dark with thousands of large motorboats operated by people who are drunk and who don’t know how to drive. Obviously, this was not a problem when Lino and his cohort were growing up. It’s pretty hard to hurt anybody with a wooden rowing boat, at least not to the degree a big boat powered by 90 or 140 or more horses.
In fact — not to cast a pall over what I intend to be a jaunty little post — two young women who were aboard a motorboat zooming back to Chioggia after the fireworks have not yet made it home. Because the boat ran into a piling at high speed — just about every motorboat leaving Venice was going from fast to pretty fast to crazy fast — and one woman hit her head against the other woman’s head. The first woman lingered about a day, and is now in heaven. The other woman, who had snagged a ride home with them just on an impulse, is in the hospital recovering from various fractures. As for the driver/owner/ friends who were aboard, I don’t know what state they’re in, but two of the boys/men/whatever have fled. I tell you this only to indicate that I am not inventing notions about how dangerous it is out there. What surprises me is that disaster struck so few. Not much comfort to the families of all involved.
My first look at the morning's harvest made me wonder if there were any mussels actually to be found in the middle of this wreckage.
So Friday morning (Saturday night being the high point), Lino and I went to the club to help clean the mussels. A vast feast — probably more Rabelaisian than Lucullan — was planned, and our contribution was to do some of the prep work. Little did I know what ten tons of extremely wild mussels will do to your hands.
The set-up is simple. Take a mussel or clump of same from the big tub; remove the material covering it; throw the mussel into medium-size bucket, and the nameless material into the small bucket.
Forget how they look, in their just-scraped-off-the-pilings dishabille. They’re ghastly, I agree. Even I gave some serious thought to striking mussels off my must-eat list for, like, forever. But the ones we took home, all clean and shiny, were absolutely delectable. So you know, don’t judge a mussel by its encrustations.
But as you see, real mussels emerge from the rugby scrum in the big tub. These look almost edible. Rinsed and stirred around with a big wooden stick, they come out looking just like something you can't wait to eat.
After spending hours pulling and scraping off plant and all sorts of other matter, not to mention rending them from each other one by one, my hands felt as if I’d been pulling nettles. Three days later, a few fingers were still a little red and swollen. Now I understand why one of the men put on rubber gloves. I live, I learn.
A certain number of men got to cooking. There were great things to eat but there was also fifty times more than anyone could ever consume. Fried shrimp and deep-fried fresh zucchini and sarde in saor, the aforementioned mussels, grilled pork ribs and sausage and lamb chops and fresh tomatoes out of the garden in the back, and — I begin to lose the thread here — there was also something I’d never even heard of, much less tasted: deep-fried sage leaves. You can have your fried zucchini blossoms, I’m going to take the sage any chance I get.
The blackboard at the club says, and I translate: (L) "Menu: What there is." (R) On the occasion of the Redentore, Saturday we close at 12:00."
The table is set, the vases of basil are in place, ready (they say) to repel mosquitoes, and the view over the canal of San Marco toward the Lido cannot be surpassed.
After that the sheer quantity began to press down on my brain — I know I ate many more things, but I can’t remember what. At a certain point one of the wives pulled out a homemade frozen dessert called zuccotto. The recipe I looked up here makes it sound elegant, but what we ate were pieces that seemed to have been hacked off the Ur-zuccotto with a dull cleaver. And of course there was watermelon, which is utterly non-negotiable. You can skip a whole batch of things, but yes, there will be watermelon.
Crossing the votive bridge from the Zattere to the Giudecca, to the very feet of the church of the Most Holy Redeemer, always touches me.
We watched the fireworks from afar, enjoying the highest ones and intuiting the lower ones by the shimmering glow through the treetops. It was more comfortable than sitting in a boat right under them, but much less exciting. I don’t see the point in fireworks if the’re not going to be exciting. You might as well watch them on TV, or through the wrong end of a telescope, and wear earmuffs.
After the fireworks – or as they put it, “pyrotechnic display” — the countless motorboats began to stream homeward. The paper estimated that some 110,000 people came to party, but didn’t hazard a guess as to how many boats. There were so many they were tying up to public lighting stanchions, not at all a good idea.
We all sat there, sticky with watermelon juice, watching the migration. It was like the wildebeest at high speed, with big roaring mechanical voices, each with a little red light gleaming from its left flank.
Next day: The races. Now they were exciting. Lots of wind, lots of tension, lots of — unfortunately — waves. Something is going to have to be done, the racers can hardly row anymore. But that’s a subject for another day.
For those who are interested in a few more statistics, the spectacle (fireworks, etc.) cost about 100,000 euros. Doesn’t sound like much, I know — actually, I had the impression that the show was shorter than some other years.
The poppieri, or stern rowers, gather with the judge to draw lots for their positions on the starting line. They may look relaxed, but there are men whose hands are visibly shaking when they reach into the bag for their number.
Three of the nine gondolas begin to warm up, and head for the starting line.
The men and the boat can take it, but the wind and waves were something to contend with.
It was hard going for the pupparinos too.
The "cavata," or blast out of the starting gate (so to speak) can make a huge difference. Here, the "Vignottini" on the white gondola have shot to the front. In the last minute of the race, pink pulled past them.
The phenomenal Franco Dei Rossi, known as "Strigheta," finished fourth (he takes home a blue pennant) in the 34th year he's rowed this race. You cannot tell me that that is the arm of a 56-year-old man. And yet, it is.
